Pioneering new ideas of life and health in the 21st Century. The flagship publication for the most innovative and authoritative writer/speaker/instructor on Understanding Conditioning. While he started out like all his friends wondering how to make exercise harder, his breakthrough idea was making exercise as easy as possible -- and therefore inevitable and unavoidable -- as the only effective lifelong strategy for those activities.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Designing Exercise to Make Sense

Most people rightly object to doing exercise because it doesn't make sense -- but that's what their coaches and trainers are there to force them to do -- otherwise they wouldn't do it.

But that's like not learning anything unless there is somebody to give one a grade for it -- and if no one will, then what is the sense?

Both are the same kind of wrong conditioning models, that try to force one to do things that don't make sense to most people, but they are indoctrinated to believe is what is good for them -- and a few years later, there may be a new edict in town, often directly contradicting what was thought and taught previously.

Among the most obvious to many, is the belief that withholding fluids from athletes made them better athletes, rather than that it could seriously endanger health, let alone impair one's performance. More recently, it was thought that exposure to sunlight, was damaging, rather than it is now being regarded, as one of the essential ingredients of life -- for which other plants and animals also evolved in as living proof of its necessity. That's almost like believing that deep breathing is bad for one, or more commonly is the case, that exercise itself is bad, because the exercises recommended, are ill-advised and ill-conceived -- even the popular running, walking, and treadmill, which can be either or both.

Those latter exercises are predicated on the premise that the reason for exercise, is to make the heart work harder and faster, rather than to optimize the circulation so that the heart isn't stressed, which is originally the rationale for the "target heart rate," of setting a "maximum" heart rate far short of the ultimate theoretical maximum, which is arbitrary because the range is much greater than the averages would suggest.

The averages are not the ideal -- for every particular individual. Far more important, is each individual's personal range and history. If one has a particular allergy to anything, it doesn't matter that most people do not. And one will not necessarily be able to become more average by a systematic program of increasing one's tolerance to it; very likely, the opposite adverse reaction is more likely the case.

As one ages particularly, what seems to be obvious to even the most undiscriminating observers, is that there is a profound change in appearance of those in declining health, from those in the years of their growth and beneficial maturation -- that is most dramatic in those formerly outstanding in their fields of accomplishment, when their entire appearance seems to be characterized by a bloated look. Formerly world champion athletes look twice as big as their former selves; conversely, the most dramatic transformations occur in the rarer other direction.

But both are characterized by a common atrophying of the musculature so that there is very little control in altering their condition. Thus their range of appearance becomes more fixed -- until finally, there is almost a rigor mortis in their form.

If one is simply observant of these things, designing movements and expressions that make sense to directly prevent this deterioration and dysfunction, should be very obvious beyond walking, running and the treadmill -- which is practically a denial of these observations of what is lacking and needs to be articulated, expressed and exercised.

It is the range of movement at the extremities that indicate the fluidity or congestive failure of the circulatory flow.